Wage Calculator

What should you be making?

Americans' wages have lagged further and further behind productivity gains since the late 1970s, but it wasn’t always this way.
After World War II, our pay rose with productivity—the more we made, the more we were paid.
Today, the gap between American workers’ productivity and their wages is at an all-time high.
What could you be making if wages had grown with productivity?

Enter your current annual wage:

If wages had kept up with productivity over the last three decades, your pay would be closer to:

EPI wage-productivity calculator methodology

Wages are measured using the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group (CPS-ORG) for 1979 and 2013.
Productivity growth is measured between 1979 and 2013 using total economy productivity as of February 14, 2014.

Using annual wages and transforming hourly wage reports into full-time, full-year workers (when annual wages are not available),
we create 1979 and 2013 wage ventile cut-offs (e.g. 5th percentile, 10th percentile, 15th percentile, etc.) from the wage distribution using the CPS-ORG.
Comparing 1979 and 2013, we measure how wages at each point in the distribution grew over that time period.
Applying productivity growth to the 1979 wage values, we create a counter-factual story on how wages could
have grown if they had kept up with productivity as wages did in the three decades following WWII.
We linearly extrapolate results for user values between the ventile cut-offs.

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EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.